How do I submit a letter to the editor?

If you have a substantial comment, feedback, a critique or additional information related to a paper recently published in a JMIR journal, we encourage you to

a) submit a comment in our new community discussion boards (we will usually encourage the author to respond and take part in the discussion), or

b) submit a formal short letter to the editor.

If you are the author of a published article and we sent you a letter critiquing your paper you also use the letter submission workflow to submit a reply to a letter. We may publish the letter and the reply of the author. In the letter pathway, we will not invite the author of the original letter to reply to the reply, to avoid an endless back and forth, thus such discussions are better taken to the community discussion boards. Letters as well as replies to letters should be short and succinct.

If you decide to submit a formal "letter to the editor" which we will consider for publication in the journal, usually with a response from the author. A letter submission is done using the regular submission system. As "section" choose "Letter to the Editor" from the drop-down list in the submission process.

The letter should be no more than 500 words, and should have 1-5 references, where the first one should cite the JMIR paper you are commenting on.

As noted above, we will invite the original JMIR authors to review and possibly comment on / reply to your letter. We may publish their reply together with the letter. 

Letters must comment on a previously published JMIR article (usually not older than 6 months*) and must contain important additional information or critical questions adding value to the understanding of the published paper. We do not allow brief research reports as letter, please submit a brief original paper instead (APFs apply).

*While the article the letter is referring to should usually not be older than 6 months, we will consider letters that comment on important issues threatening the validity of a paper (we will ask the author to respond). 

Issues or questions to possible research misconduct should be raised with the editor by sending an email to ed-support@jmir.org.

Any other issues are better handled in a private conversation / email exchange with authors.

Should the letter be published, it will be free of charge for the author. We do not publish all letters, but at a minimum will forward your letter to the author, and invite them to respond.

If you are an author of a previously published JMIR paper wishing to add to or correct your previous paper , do not submit a letter, but a correction or addendum (may be subject to a small article processing fee).

Note that unlike some other journals we do not currently publish "research letters", i.e. short papers containing original research. Such papers should be submitted as Short Paper (the regular article processing fees apply). Also, if you have a substantial commentary or viewpoint on an issue, this should be submitted as "Viewpoint", not as letter to the editor (again, the regular article processing fees apply). 

See also:

How to become an author at JMIR

We published a paper in JMIR and have a correction. What is the process of publishing a corrigendum?

For staff only: (for staff) How to Handle Letters